In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism

A defense of effective altruism against the post-FTX pile-on. Opens with the litany of mutually-contradictory accusations EA faces from every direction, then marshals a long, footnoted accomplishments list (~200,000 lives saved mostly from malaria, 25M dewormings, cage-free for 400M chickens, founding AI safety, RLHF, the forecasting renaissance, a major role in YIMBY). The core move: EA has saved roughly the lives that ending US gun violence + curing AIDS + melanoma + preventing a 9/11 each year would, but nobody notices because developing-world deaths aren't salient — which is the exact skewed-priorities problem EA exists to exploit, and which makes the FTX/OpenAI screwups minor by comparison. Closes by rebutting 'global health is just a distraction from the weird AI stuff': movements are coalitions, and the same people who can care about neglected tropical diseases are the ones who can care about pandemics and AI, because the shared skill is reasoning about importance instead of following Twitter.

Quality 79 · Excellent. Excellent band, low. An important, widely-cited, rhetorically powerful defense whose accomplishments-list is devastating evidence and whose 'judge us on the 200,000 lives' framing became a reference point. Top tier of the census, level with the Aborigines review (79); held below the higher Excellent band because it is advocacy resting on a salience-bias argument he has made elsewhere, rather than a new framework.

Claude’s paradigm shift 42 · Moderate. Moderate. The salience-bias and movements-as-coalitions arguments are from his existing toolkit; the marshaling is forceful but not novel at publication.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. An important, widely-cited post-FTX defense of Effective Altruism whose 'judge us on the ~200,000 lives saved' framing became a reference point. Real significance via its role in defending a materially-consequential movement (malaria nets, deworming, animal welfare), but the post itself is advocacy shaping perception rather than the material action — modest RWI.